When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.
People want to listen to a message, word from Jah. This could be passed through me or anybody. I am not a leader. Messenger. The words of the songs, not the person, is what attracts people.
The whole point is, give me a break with the standards. You go to the average jazz label and suggest a record and they want to know which standards you're going to play. I'm saying let's break the formula.
We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.
Student journeys which were important to me were Sicily, Greece, and Egypt, where I really saw these buildings, and that is where you're able to grasp what things mean.
The latest page I've been working is about the organization of the pantheon of the gods. Who's indebted to whom, how they are related, who screwed whose uncle or grandmother, all of that.
I didn't say I wasn't gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain't gonna sing no song that ain't a country song. I won't be known as anything but a country singer.
I'm in an absolute frenzy towards doing as many things as I can that I want to do today. The rest can wait till tomorrow, next week, if I'm around we'll take a look.
I didn't have to be a pop singer with a certain look. When I started, there was really a revolution in natural artists with blues and folk artists crossing over; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get started.
I'm certain that it was an incredible gift for me to not only be friends with some of the greatest blues people who've ever lived, but to learn how they played, how they sang, how they lived their lives, ran their marriages, and talked to their kids.
I learned early in my writing career that if I try to tailor a song for someone else, I'm usually off base. They're usually looking for something from you with your character.
In any case, whenever technical progress opened a new window into the surrounding world, I felt the urge to look through this window, hoping to see something unexpected.
Every drummer that had a name, had a name because of his individual playing. He didn't sound like anybody else, So everybody that I ever listened to, in some form, influenced my taste.
I mean, I think I liked every band I ever played in because each band was different, each band had a different concept, and each band leader was different... different personalities and musical tastes.
To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.
We didn't have practical model rockets in the '50s. The ones we made were very dangerous and the kids that played with them didn't have all their fingers, and sometimes were blind in one eye.
I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish; resettling people, helping them, and so on.
I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.
I wear the same black suit. I have five of them. I pair them with a red scarf. I was wearing a red scarf when I won the first architectural competition of my career.